Verve Marketing Group announces that it has received the Outstanding Achievement WebAward from the Web Marketing Association for its design and development of Thomas Nelson’s Bible website.

The WebAward is the premier website competition for web developers and advertising agencies. The competition judges all aspects of a website, with particular emphasis on the creativity, functionality, and overall interactive experience. Entries are judged and scored on design, innovation, content, technology, interactivity, copywriting, and ease of use. Sites scoring above 86% of the total possible are awarded the Outstanding Achievement WebAward.

Judges for Verve’s site design commented that the “design is very comforting and pleasing for the user… the content on the site is very strong and compelling as well.”

“A key goal for us was to elevate the Thomas Nelson Bibles brand and translation subbrands, as well as to create a user-friendly way for consumers to narrow down and find the right Bible from the 1,000 or so on the site,” noted Joan Begitschke, Chief Marketing Strategist at Verve Marketing Group. “Jerri Helms at HCCP came to us with the vision of creating a site that would bring all Nelson Bible translations and individual Bible product sites under one umbrella website,” she continues.

“From a technical standpoint, we had somewhat competing needs,” noted Joe Edakkunnathu, Director of Web Delivery at Verve. “We needed the site to automatically pull weekly product updates from Nelson’s Onix feed – and it was also important to have an easy to use backend for the large and frequently updated blog section of the site,” says Joe. “Creating a custom site in the WordPress platform was the best solution in this case.”

Web design and development firms compete globally within 95 industry categories in the annual WebAward competition. The Thomas Nelson Bibles site won in the Publishing category.